


Blues for Sister Someone

by helenblackthorn



Category: Dark Artifices Series - Cassandra Clare, Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/F, Mark & Helen brotp bonding, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 12:05:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6374068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helenblackthorn/pseuds/helenblackthorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The missing phone call scene between Mark and Helen after Mark returns to Los Angeles to find that she is not there. </p><p>(Some canon divergence, but nothing major)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blues for Sister Someone

Mark stared down at the old cell phone in his hands, turning it back and forth between them. He had wanted to  _ see  _ his full-blood sister rather talk to her over the phone - and he could have, apparently, if he had called her through Skype on Ty’s computer, Watson - but somehow this felt more appropriate. After being plunged into a world he no longer recognized, this felt more familiar than a computer screen, and Mark did not want to ask his younger brother how to use it. Not now, not after what he’s done.

His feet swung from the edge of the rooftop, bare and rough from years without cover. He’d taken the boots Julian had given him off some time ago. They were too tight fitting and restricting and felt awkward to wear. He’d much rather not have them on at all. He had gotten so used to not having shoes in the Hunt that it seemed natural to be without them.

“ _ Just for now _ ,” Julian had said as he stuffed the boots into Mark’s hands. “ _ This is Los Angeles. You could step on something sharp and we don’t need you getting gangrene _ .”

His fingers fumbled awkwardly with the phone, searching through the contacts for Helen’s name. Emma had given it to him. She’d said it was one of the Institute’s spares, an ancient thing that was rarely ever touched, and that they had installed Helen’s new number on it ages ago just in case. Emma told him that he could keep it for now. It would sit in a dusty box for years before anyone ever used it, and it was nearly indestructible. Perfect for him, she’d said.

When he found Helen’s name, his thumb hovered over the screen with a sudden rush of anxiety. There was five years of lost time between them and he didn’t know what to say, or how to begin to say anything at all when he couldn’t see her face. Mark had always thought she was in Los Angeles. It was what he relied on, that she was there taking care of the children with her wife, Aline, when he could not be. 

For five years he held onto that thought, because of the Shadowhunter Simon Lovelace, and all that time it’d been a lie.

But it had gotten him through darker times. The times in the beginning when he had resisted the Hunt, resisted his fellows and that faery child in him that had always truly been there, locked away inside of him. Times before he gave in, before he learned to love the howl of the wind in his ears, through his hair, the fire beneath his skin as he rode among starlight. Mark wondered what it would have been like if he had known all that responsibility landed on a twelve year old boy's shoulders.

Mark pressed back the anxiety and gave into his want to talk to his sister, to get answers, to know for certain that she was alright and this wasn’t some sort of trick. He hit call, and held the phone to a pointed ear patiently. It rang several times over and Mark was ready to hang up, a throb of disappointment in his chest, when she finally picked up.

“Hello?”

The voice on the other end was muffled with sleep, one he hadn’t heard in years and a bit more matured, but would recognize anywhere. Something felt warm in Mark’s chest; a sense of longing. His Helen, his sister who understood him more than anyone. More than his Kieran even, more than Gwyn. The only one in his family quite like him. He remembered, his memories like murky water, the times he and Helen would sit in her bedroom or in the training room or out on the roof when he was upset and talk of nothing and everything. How he could go to her and no one else when visiting Nephilim jabbed at him, when their words cut him deeper than he let on. She had lived it too, through the insults and dirty looks, so Helen always understood him. Always.

“...Hello?” She tried again, voice tinged with confusion.

Mark gripped the phone tighter in his hand and cleared his throat with a small smile of relief. “Hello, Helen.”

There was a short pause. “I’m sorry, who is this?”

“It is your brother, Mark,” he said, remembering suddenly the lilt of his accent; one he had acquired after years of riding alongside Gwyn, speaking in different tongues. He no longer sounded like the sixteen year old LA boy Helen would have remembered. 

There was silence on the other end of the line; he would have thought that, somehow, the reception had suddenly cut off, had it not been for the soft intake of breath. “Mark,” Helen said quietly, suddenly sounding more awake than before. “By the Angel.”

He leaned back on his hand, the sun hot on his back through his threadbare T-shirt. “I am sorry if I woke you. I didn’t realize what time it would be there -”

“It’s alright,” Helen interrupted quickly, then, softer she said, “you’re home? How?”

Mark considered, briefly, telling her the true reason why he was really here. That the Hunt had not simply given him back; that he was here because he was to help the Shadowhunter’s find this serial killer behind the Clave’s back. He trusted Helen not to have said anything to anyone, even being married to the Consul’s daughter - she had a disregard for the Clave as much as any other Blackthorn did and justifiably so. But he did not want to trouble her or get her involved in breaking the law.

“I was brought home,” Mark said instead, and the words felt slightly heavy on his tongue. It wasn’t an untruth, just not the whole thing, but his years spent in Faerie had hindered his ability to lie.

On the other end of the phone there was a short ruffle, like someone getting out of bed, and then he heard a door quietly click shut. “How long have you been back?” She asked, considerably louder than she was before. He figured Aline must have still been sleeping. “I didn’t think they - Hunter’s swear to ride with Gwyn for their eternal lives. You can’t just come back.”

Mark stared out at the ocean, it’s deep blues and greens reflecting under the sun. Beneath its surface was another world, one filled with demons as much as the one above it. “I cannot explain,” he said. “Not right now.”

“But-”

“I did not know you weren’t here,” Mark pressed on before she could continue, determined to keep her out of their investigation. She had provided the map with Magnus Bane for the Spiral Labyrinth, according to Emma, and that was as far as she needed to be involved. If the Clave came down on their heads for this, Helen need not be in the crossfire even more than she already was. “Simon Lovelace told me long ago that he had seen you, and that you were getting married to Aline Penhallow. I thought you were here. And now our brother’s and sister’s tell me that you’ve been exiled to the arctic wastelands of Wrangel Island.”

Helen sighed. There was a crackle of static, minute but noticeable. Reception must not have been very good there. “Maybe it was better that you didn’t know,” she said. 

“Perhaps,” he said. “But I wish I would have known. I have flown over that place many times and I would have come to see you if I had.” Mark’s mixed eyes watched the waves crash along the shore, fingernails scraping against the rough ground. “Maybe I would have taken you away. Away from the Clave and their punishments and into the Faerielands. If they chose to banish an innocent girl for who she is they do not deserve her loyalty.”

“Mark,” Helen reprimanded, and she sounded for a moment like the older sister he remembered, the one who had once thwacked him over the head with his book when he’d given her an attitude about going shopping for Christmas. “They were scared-”

“Don’t defend them,” he said sharply.

He’d been informed that Helen had lectured at the Academy in Idris and had been treated horribly there. That Simon recounted her being treated like a freak of nature, like someone less than human, and it angered Mark to think that perhaps their jabs and humiliation and commands had made her believe she deserved it.

“I’m not,” Helen huffed defiantly. “Of course I’m not. I was just going to say that after everything that happened, Jia feared for my life. Shadowhunter’s wanted my runes stripped and some even wanted me dead, Mark. I don’t think you kidnapping me would have made anything any better on our behalf.”

“They sent you away from your home. They abandoned me. And they did it all out of hatred for who we are.” Mark said, and then took a deep breath. He had not called Helen to launch into a fury of betrayal from the Nephilim all over again. So he said, in a voice considerably calmer than before, “What they did was unforgivable.”

“I know,” Helen said softly, and Mark was stricken the second time that day of how much he had missed her, his full-blood sister.

“I miss you,” he told her, the most simple and human thing that he had said in a long while. “I want you to come home.”

Helen sniffed, delicate as she always was.  _ Like a flower _ , he recalled Andrew saying,  _ just like her mother _ . Mark suspected that she was crying. “I miss you too, Marky,” she said quietly, and the old nickname struck him with an emotion he couldn’t decipher. “I wish so badly that I could, to see all of you and take over the Institute.” There was another pause, this time brief, and Helen sighed. “I’m learning alot here, though, to become one of the experts on ward magic. Maybe, eventually, that’ll be enough.”

Mark felt his throat tighten. Helen had been the only one who could understand why being back in Los Angeles was difficult for him. She knew Faerie well enough to know how he felt. But now he supposed she felt her place here was questionable too, after being away from California for so long. And the law, this miserable law, was preventing them from seeing each other. “I am so sorry, Helen,” he said, and something in his chest fractured, echoing the love from him and into his voice. He hated the way it shook.

“I am too,” said Helen, so quiet he almost had to strain to hear her.

The door leading back into the Institute clicked shut, and Mark turned his head slowly to find Cristina Rosales standing there, her hands wrung together and looking awkward. He held up a hand.  _ Stay,  _ the gesture said. They should talk.

Helen spoke again before Mark could. “I should go,” she sighed, and she sounded exhausted and tearful’ he felt bad for keeping her up, but selfishly did not regret it. “Tell the other’s I’ll call soon. I love you, baby brother.”

Mark swallowed thickly. “And I, you, my sister.”

She hung up shortly after that, and Mark let his hand fall back into his lap, his phone screen flashing as the call ended. Cristina hovered, and Mark slid the phone into his pocket of his jeans and pushed back the sudden pang of loneliness.

The pity in her eyes was almost suffocating. 


End file.
